Honey, I'm Home - Mix Me a Martini

Is having a bar in the home a thing of the past? Growing up I remember a lot of people had bars in their homes. It was the "Mad Men" era and drinking excessively to the point of inebriation wasn't really frowned upon during that time. So maybe Don Draper and Roger Sterling drank a little too much---an occupational hazard---but the culture of out-of-control drinking was a reality, if not a pose leading to sexually promiscuous behavior. 


Most of the family bars were located in finished basements---a kind of swinging party room with a felt turn table record player, a little floor space for dancing, and plastic guitars and saxophones tacked to the painted cinder block walls or murky paneling. We had an unfinished basement in my house, so the bar, an upright, heavily lacquered wood model, was situated in a corner of the den. The den was paneled in knotty pine, with a big color TV, two faux leather recliner chairs, a fish tank and a gun rack. 


When my father worked graveyard shift at the paper mill, he would often arrive home at about 7:30 or 8:00, and as I watched Captain Kangaroo and dressed for school, he would stand at this bar in the den and mix himself a Manhattan, or maybe Scotch on the rocks (J.B. or Dewars). It felt a little strange to see him drinking so early in the day, but I realized it was the end of his day and he needed to unwind. After a few drinks, and a few Marlboro cigarettes, my father would sit down to eat a hybrid breakfast-dinner of steak and eggs, and then head off to bed where hopefully he'd be able to sleep undisturbed until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. But at any time of the day, this bar was always a presence. My father would pour himself drinks at the bar every evening, and on holidays he and his brothers would stand at the bar and consume ridiculous amounts of alcohol, so that by the time everyone else sat down to enjoy the holiday meal, my father and uncles would stagger to the dinner table, and often manage to quickly insult someone, usually my grandmother, their mother. 


The green bottles and brown bottles and clear bottles, the big red "7" on the Seagrams bottle, the clink of glass or ice tumbling into a glass, the shicka-shicka-shicka of a chrome shaker. There was an ice bucket. Scotch, bourbon, blended whiskey, gin, later vodka. There was always beer from the fridge in pilsner glasses. Martinis, Old Fashions, and Whiskey Sours, Screwdrivers---yes, the bar was a busy place, a place to make drinks, pour drinks, and enjoy the mildly pleasant chemistry of it.  And yet a simple glass of Scotch or a Shaeffers with a whiskey chaser was usually the drink of choice . . . and as time passed and the bar looked weathered and cheap from countless spills, there would be more Vodka included, because Vodka was easier to hide.


Years later, after my father had quit drinking alcohol and joined A.A., he may have kept the bar around for a short time, possibly for entertaining guests, possibly as a test of will power, the amber and green bottles like sirens to his Odysseus lashed to the spar. Although I no longer lived at home, I do recall at one point the bar was gone, because my mother didn't drink, and most of the guests they were entertaining were also affiliated with A.A., and it didn't seem to make sense to leave the bar standing unused. Within a few more years the habit of drinking, and especially the habit of drinking too much,  would undergo serious examination, forcing new laws and changes in our behavior: D.U.I. , blood alcohol limits, M.A.D.D. and the designated driver program would raise public awareness about alcohol abuse. I don't need to wonder where all those old, tacky bars ended up.

Age of Unreason

The ambulance would often come in the mid to late afternoon, rarely after dark. Mrs. Frick again. It took little more than a phone call from her husband, or possibly a neighbor, to summon the medics and the ambulance. Usually, but not always, there would be some prior episode: a radio blaring so loud you heard it a block away, (and it was still loud a block away) accompanied by a middle-aged woman's ear-splitting shrieks as she sang along with one of her favorite songs on the radio; or blood curdling domestic battles, and then the ambulance, the opened rear doors, the gurney, the strait jacket. Mrs. Frick wasn't removed from her house immediately. I imagined the two men in white uniforms first needed to restrain and sedate her, and soon everything would become quiet again, that serene suburban quiet which thinly masked the menace, disillusionment, alienation, insanity, alcoholism, domestic violence and a plethora of family skeletons from street to street. In the quiet the ambulance lights continued to whirl, and eventually the men in white would carry out Mrs. Frick strapped down on the gurney so that you could barely make out her face, she may have already been unconscious. Then the siren would wail momentarily as the ambulance sped away, and you knew, even as a kid, that Mrs. Frick was being taken to a bad place.


We seem to be far from the days when husbands locked their wives up in mental institutions or had them lobotomized. Due to the rise of feminism and the mental health de-institutionalization movement of the 1970s, and largely the pharmacology revolution of the late '80s and '90s that introduced SSRI's, the scene just described is something you will likely never see again. It is not just a sad story in American history; it's a sad story in human history. Mrs. Frick was not an isolated example, though she was one of the worst I'd seen. But there were a number of mothers and housewives across Wayward who'd either been forcibly removed from their families to the nearest mental hospital, or were taking tranquilizers or another prescribed sedative, occasionally chased with alcohol, and were trapped in a solemn, soap-opera Daytime-TV Hell. A hit song in 1966 was the Rolling Stones "Mother's Little Helper" which seemed more about amphetamines but was still an effect of the same tortured experience.

During periods when Mrs. Frick hadn't been locked up and was allowed to stay home, she would sometimes cross the street to Nick's house where a group of us would be standing around and smoking cigarettes. Mrs. Frick was a chain smoker, inclined to run out of cigarettes. She would then come and visit us in front of Nick's house to cadge cigarettes. In the space of ten minutes Mrs. Frick would manage to smoke several cigarettes and between us we would donate another 10 or 15 for her to take back home. She was a frightening figure: steel wool hair wild and frizzled; complexion a sepia-ash with darker macules on her arms, wrists and hands, presumably those locations where syringes and IVs had pinched and plunged; her hazel eyes clouded over, enthralled by some distant inner visions, never looking directly at you or even at an object close by. But Mrs. Frick did talk to us, and though at first we were a bit wary of her because her conversation was disjointed and nonsensical, she would somehow manage to utter a few weird but uncannily relevant sentences that would make all of us laugh and the tension would ease up. She was trying to win us over; we had cigarettes after all. What had been done to her wasn't entirely her fault, but you still feared that she might somehow turn violent at the slightest word or action. It was her unpredictability that was most unsettling.

By the early '70s the Frick's house had been sold. The gossip at the time circulated around Mrs. Frick having been put away for good and possibly dead, which, to society, didn't make much difference.  The two children were adults and out of the house, and the husband was off to some privileged bachelor life . . . somewhere. But no one really knew for sure.